The Origins of the US Army's Korean Comfort Women
By Choi Kilsong,
Professor at Dong-a University, Professor Emeritus at Hiroshima University

Chapter 2. From Rape to Prostitution
The "necessary evil" of prostitution
The US Army stockpiled condoms in order to protect its men from STDs. Whenever itrained you could see condoms flowing everywhere. Children filled them up with water andplayed with them. At my uncle's house condoms could be procured cheaply so he cut theminto long, thin strips with a razor to make rubber strings and set up a business of sewing
them into the ankle part of socks. Condoms had once seemed to us like the incarnation ofsexual vice, but we learned to stop worrying about that.
Why is it that comfort women appeared on the battlefield? Things like Confucian morality
vanish in a time of war when people are concerned only with their own survival, but this is
not easy for people who have never experienced war to understand. To be blunt, I saw with
my own eyes and I know that even the greatest outrages like sexual assault will be tolerated
in those circumstances. Actually, I suppose that was pretty much the same experience forall the other villagers. That is the reason why we forgave those among us who became
communist and we warmly accepted into our village women who had been prostitutes. Thisis the most important life lesson that I learned from the war.
Even the sex crimes of some soldiers become momentarily understandable if we assume
that they are on the battlefield. The question which I want to pose to the reader is, "Whatwould you be capable of if your life was at risk every day." During and after an intense,
bloody battle, it seemed as if the soldiers had gone insane. What I saw was reminiscent of
Oliver Stone's film, Platoon.
When the US Army came to our village there was an explosion of sexual violence, andwhen prostitutes flocked to the village, we welcomed them in the way that I describedearlier. The prostitutes were the village's saviors. We had the real fear that, without them,all of the women in the village might become the target of sexual assault. In other words,
we invited the prostitutes in as a means of self-defense, and that is how we became a"prostitution village".
To ward off sexual assaults by violent soldiers, the villagers slackened their rigid traditionsof Confucian sexual morality and accepted prostitution. Once we had justified this toourselves, we even turned it into a source of revenue. The villagers supported theprostitutes, even though they were outsiders, while viewing prostitution as a necessary evil1

in order to protect the chastity of their own family members and relatives. The prostitutes
kept the village sexually safe, and the fact that we could also make a profit by renting
rooms to them was just an added bonus. With that it took no time at all for us to make thetransformation to "prostitution village". Furthermore, this was not purely a phenomenon of
my own home village. Rather, the same thing spread to all the areas around where troops
were stationed and a sort of de facto licensed prostitution system developed.
Nevertheless, sexual violence and prostitution do exist outside of war. These things
continued after the war ended and prostitution still exists in South Korea today, so much sothat the country has even been called a "prostitution paradise". According to a report by theSupreme Prosecutors' Office of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Women's
Development Institute, "There are one million women engaged in prostitution" in South
Korea. No law has achieved any significant steps towards eliminating prostitution, not the
Prostitution Prevention Law, which mandates up to one year in prison or else a fine of up to
three million won for both the prostitute and the client, nor the Juvenile Protection Act,
which mandates up to one year in prison for paying for sexual services from a minor. Whatis the reason that prostitution became so widespread in South Korea, in direct contradiction
to Korean society's veneration of chastity and its strict, rigidly enforced concept of sexual
morality which even includes the Confucian principle that boys and girls over the age ofseven sit separately from one another? Actually it is precisely because South Koreans insist
so strongly on their thoroughly Confucian concept of sexual purity that we need prostitutes
as a defensive barrier to protect the chastity of ordinary women in the case of an increase insexual assaults.
I wrote this book based on my experiences of war and my ponderings on the essence ofhuman nature, and I don't believe that its contents can be rebutted by those who have neverlived through a war. It makes no sense for the postwar generation to judge the killings andrapes that took place in a time of war. The only thing we can pass judgment on now is theultimate crime of war itself, which changes human nature and is the root cause of evil
behavior. It is not a matter of trying the crimes that took place amidst the chaos of war, butrather it is a matter of trying the country which started the war.
The so-called "comfort women problem"
Neither I nor the many other scholars who had done field surveys throughout South Korea
had ever heard of the so-called "comfort women". And yet, the issue found its way into
Japanese-language media and then became a political problem and human rights issue
within South Korea. I realized early on that this had been caused by the false testimony of
Yoshida Seiji and misreporting published in the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun.
Certain South Koreans have offered a variety of explanations for why the comfort women
problem did not emerge until fifty years after the end of the war. They say that the Japanesecolonial government burned documents in order to hide the truth, that the United States
glossed over Japanese war crimes during the occupation period, or that former comfort
women were too ashamed to return to Korea. The women, they say, were shunned as sexual2deviants for having been violated by men from a different country, but that was not the only
reason why Korea's political leaders and intellectuals tried to turn the comfort women
problem into a social issue.
Just when the comfort women were on the verge of being buried in the pages of history,
women's rights organizations raised the issue, declaring that "The shame of the comfort
women is the shame of all Koreans", but the South Korean mass media showed no interestin the essence of the problem and only wanted to stir up hatred against Japan. The comfort
women were transformed into victims of crimes against the Korean people, and now thatthey had the noble mission of promoting nationalist feelings, the women themselves began
to come forward. In other words, a new discourse had been created claiming that the takingof the virginity of Korean women by Japanese troops was not only a rape of the womenthemselves, but also a rape of the whole nation of Korea. It was at that time that Korean
President Kim Dae-jung officially asked for "clarification of the historical and moral
responsibility of the Japanese government" in relation to the comfort women problem.
There is no clear difference between the way that comfort women were recruited by theJapanese Army and the way that they were recruited by the US Army. However, thecomfort women system administered by Japan is considered a product of Japanese colonial
rule, whereas the US Army liberated Korea from Japanese rule and came to South Korea asan ally during the Korean War. Therefore, the way Koreans feel about the two systems isquite different. If people merely point out that Korea was doing the same sort of thing,
without first understanding this important distinction, then no path to compromise on thematter will ever be found.
Photo Caption: A statue of a comfort women in front of the Japanese embassy in South
Korea.
Of course, if South Koreans exploit the comfort women problem in the diplomatic arena, itwill boomerang back to them in the form of the US Army's own comfort women problem.
If a statue is built in memory of the comfort women of the Japanese Army, there will besome people who will pipe up and ask for another statue beside it in memory of the comfort
women of the US Army. The immature diplomatic actions of South Korea need to stop
immediately. In order to ensure that the contentious comfort women issue will not stoke
mutual hatred, both Korea and Japan must listen with sincerity to what the other side has tosay.
Sexual violence by the US Army and Korea-American relations
Could it be that sexual violence is an inevitable part of war? Conflicts in Yugoslavia andRussia have also been characterized by sexual violence, so why are we only discussing the"comfort women" of wartime Japan? People have said that the comfort women of wartime
Japan were unique in that they were part of a state approved system. However, the root of
the problem is sexual violence by soldiers, not the question of the military approved system.
To me the bigger issue is why we have completely ignored the clearly criminal acts of the3

UN Army. I am referring to the cruel sexual assaults perpetrated by American soldiersduring the Korean War.
The Chinese Army was very gentlemanly, but I know that the men of the US Army and theSouth Korean Army attacked women in our village. And yet, when I tell that to my fellow
Koreans today, no one believes me. Still, at the very least all the people who lived in myvillage back then do know what happened. In the face of the undeniable truth that myvillage experienced firsthand, Koreans prefer to turn a deaf ear.
After the war, the government of President Park Chung-hee tried to preserve Confucian
sexual morality while at the same time pursuing a policy of tolerating prostitution. My own
hometown had been one of the originators of this scheme, and soon the US Army's comfort
women spread throughout the country and became part of the official policy of both theUnited States and South Korea. These comfort women were deemed by the Korean
government to be patriots who were ensuring the safety of the Korean Peninsula bysatisfying the sexual urges of American servicemen. This demonstrates that, even thoughthese women were despised under time-honored Confucian ideas, they were treasured by
the Korean government because of their role as earners of foreign currency.
In Korea the female entertainers known as kisaeng are looked down on as "whores" (galbo),
and comfort women servicing American soldiers are called "Western whores". However,they are also known as "Western princesses". In others words, the way Koreans describe
the prostitutes involves a dichotomy of viewing them as both "whores" and "princesses".
These prostitutes spearheaded the modernization of the nation through their earning of
foreign currency, and thus became patriotic women. The South Korean government
gathered up women who had left their farms or who were unemployed, called them"patriots", and trained them to be comfort women.
Although the sex trade was outlawed through the Prostitution Prevention Law of 1961, thevery next year in 1962 the South Korean government designated 104 sites across Korea as
being "special districts". These were government-approved red-light districts outside thepurview of anti-prostitution laws. Because they loved their native land of Korea, women
prostituted themselves for foreign currency so that Korea's development as a capitalist
economy would continue, and thus in some quarters prostitution was called an act of
patriotism.
South Korea made a point of not strongly criticizing the US Army's use of prostitutes after
the war. In other words, there would be plenty of prostitutes for the soldiers and few legal
restrictions. Because of this, prostitution and rape involving American soldiers never
became a big social or political issue. During the war the US Army had been the benevolent
savior of Korea, and the ongoing presence of US troops in Korea was a symbol ofAmerica's pledge to defend the Korean Peninsula. In other words, Koreans sacrificed thething they had cherished as life itself, their chastity, to the ones who were defending theirlives. Certainly, the UN and US Armies did protect South Korea from the North Koreans,4and one can't deny that they contributed in a major way to the democratization andliberalization of Korea. According to administrative agreements between South Korea andthe United States, American soldiers were not to be tried in South Korea if they injured or
killed a Korean citizen, and even human rights violations by the US Army were rarely amatter for concern in Korean society. The point of this policy was to maintain friendly USKorea relations and the government's economic policies.
Today, in Korea there are 28,000 American soldiers occupying ninety-six different
locations across the country. These places have been described as hotbeds of immoral
sexual practices, venereal disease, drug addicts, and social vice, but they have all been
hospitably sponsored by the government of South Korea. When it came to prostitution andsexual violence by the US Army such things were always ignored not only by the South
Korean government, but even by Korean nationalists and feminists.
Nonetheless, as national consciousness and ideas of human rights became more prevalent inSouth Korea, a form of anti-Americanism critical of sexual violence by the US Army did
begin to arise. The Korean novel, Land of Excrement, declared that, "South Korea is a landsmeared with the excrement of American imperialism." Its author Nam Jeong-hyeon (1933) wrote that, "America's criminal occupation of South Korea is not only not fading away,
but in fact is taking deeper root." In 1965 he was charged and convicted of abetting
communism.
Clearly, South Korea's attitudes and policies towards rape and the use of prostitutes by thearmy of a foreign country will vary depending on its relationship with the country involved.
The number of Korean prostitutes who have served the US Army in the forty years since
the end of the war has been roughly estimated at between 250,000 to 300,000.
The scholar Katharine HS Moon noticed that American soldiers stationed in Korea paid forprostitutes even more than American soldiers stationed in Japan, and she attributes thatsituation to diplomatic relations between the USA and South Korea.
Moon notes that the role played by prostitutes at US Army bases in satisfying the sexualurges of American soldiers and raising their morale was viewed as an act of patriotism insupport of the South Korean government's defense of the Korean Peninsula. The existenceof prostitution and venereal disease at army bases was seen in principle as America's
problem and not as a problem that the South Korean government needed to crack down on.
According to Moon, the prostitutes of the US Army worked voluntarily, in contrast with the
comfort women of the Japanese ruled period who were pressed into service forcibly andsystematically.1

1

Editor’s note: Unfortunately, Moon’s statement is completely false. The comfort women who worked
in the Japanese military comfort station were volunteers or looking to make money. This can be verified
through various sources, such as comfort women recruitment advertisements in Seoul’s top-rated

5However, this situation changed suddenly in October of 1992 when Yun Geum-i, an
employee at a US Army clubhouse, was murdered by American soldier Kenneth Markle.
Her mangled corpse was found soon after, covered with laundry detergent in an apparent
attempt to cover up her fresh wounds. This shocking crime became a focal point for a new
anti-American movement launched by women's rights organizations. The women living
near US Army bases were portrayed as being the victims of sex crimes by Korean feminists,
who in turn joined forces with Christian groups to create substantial social furor. One
feminist group sent a petition to then-President Bill Clinton which read, "American forces
stationed in Korea commit over 2,000 crimes every year. In order to resolve this crisis at its
roots we ask you to take action to eliminate these crimes, including by amending
administrative agreements between South Korea and the United States."
A half century after US troops were first stationed in South Korea, the case of Yun Geum-i
had finally become the catalyst that pushed the nation beyond silent protest. Amidst an
explosion of popular outrage, the Joint Action Committee for the Yun Geum-i Murder Case
was founded. However, there was a need for a permanent organization and so, just before
the first anniversary of Yun's death, various associations, including women's rights
organizations, constituted the Headquarters for the Campaign to Eliminate Criminal Acts
by US Soldiers in Korea. Then on October 25, 1998 the Democratic Women's Associationof South Korea sought to keep the memory of the incident alive by holding a "memorialservice for the victims of crimes by US servicemen to mourn Yun Geum-i on the sixth
anniversary of her death".
In this manner, the tide turned against the United States and public criticism of the US
Army began to appear. The undercurrent of sexual morality and chastity inherited fromages past had not faded in Korea, and due to the rise of new social movements in feminism,
Christianity, and human rights, the Korean people seemed to have rediscovered theirtraditional ideas about sex. And yet in spite of all this, the status of the Korean-US military
relationship remained unchanged since the time of the Korean War. The city of
Dongducheon, where America's 2nd Division is stationed, continues to be a veritable redlight district. If you go out to the railway at night you can see prostitutes lined up all along
the track.
Around this same time, a Korean prostitute was murdered by an American soldier, and her
fellow sex workers carried her body through the streets in a march of protest. Nevertheless,the South Korean government did not treat this as a major scandal like a similar case which
occurred in Okinawa, Japan. The situation seems reminiscent of Japan in the immediate
aftermath of World War II. The mentalities of the occupying soldiers, the government, andnewspapers. Korean brothel dealers placed the advertisements. If the comfort women were, in fact,
forced into service, then there would have been no need for advertisements.

6the people were perhaps the same in Japan back then as in Korea now. There were plenty ofreports of sexual assaults on women by American soldiers during the postwar occupation ofJapan, but neither the Japanese government nor the Japanese people made a big deal out of
it. Only recently, following incidents of sexual violence by US soldiers stationed in
Okinawa, are the people and government of Japan finally started to take this up as a serious
problem.
Koreans should now cease pretending that problems relating to sexual violence and war are
exclusively Japanese. They must properly acknowledge that these are problems even
Koreans themselves are guilty of. Korea's narrow-minded views on this subject are theproducts of the South Korean people's poor understanding of issues relating to human rights
as well as their government's scrupulous maintenance of the benefits it receives from the
UN Army's protection. Koreans need to look at the issue from a broader perspective.
For instance, South Korean soldiers participated in the Vietnam War and were said to have
raped many Vietnamese women. It is also a fact that there are many children in Vietnam
today, known as Lai Dai Han, the fathers of whom were South Korean soldiers who
impregnated Vietnamese women during the war. However, this issue is rarely broachedwithin Korea.
Sex and war
Wartime sexual violence is not simply a matter of soldiers gratifying their sexual desires. It
has been said that the objective of rape in war is to humiliate and bring shame on not only
the women themselves, but also their husbands and families and even their country.
Consequently, racial animosity can result in sexual assaults against women of an enemy
country. For example, the French Army raped many women during the Algerian War inorder to make Algerian men lose face. It is also believed that between 30,000 and 50,000
Croatian and Muslim women were systematically raped by the Serbian Army in Bosnia,
and sources testify that one in every one hundred women became pregnant through rape. In
Bosnia, in particular, there was even one case of Serbian soldiers raping a pregnant Bosnian
woman, ripping open her belly, and nailing her unborn child to a tree.2
In addition, sexual violence occurred during the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the German
Peasants' War, the Seven Years' War, and World War II. The US Army raped women
during the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and even in Asia the South Korean Army isguilty of sexual violence against Vietnamese women, the Japanese Army against Korean
and Chinese women, and the Indonesian Army also against Chinese women. I remember
even sexual violence perpetrated by the army of South Korea against its own people.

2

Editor’s Note: Similar kinds of wild stories have circulated in every war of the 20th century—ofbabies being nailed to trees or babies being bayoneted by “depraved and vile” enemy soldiers. Suchclaims tend to sensationalize war and belittle the real horrors of war.

7

Even when military discipline was scrupulously maintained, soldiers still raped many
women. During the Vietnam War women were raped on the battlefield while up to 500,000
Vietnamese women became prostitutes, and in Indonesia, ethnic Chinese Indonesians were
the targets of sexual violence by the Indonesian Army. One can conclude from these facts
that wartime sexual violence arises from racial and ethnic hatred.
Concerning the cruel deeds perpetrated by the American and South Korean Armies during
the Vietnam War, South Korean novelist An Jeong-hyo wrote the book White Badge basedon his own war-time experiences. The book and the movie based on it depict a man who
becomes psychotic due to his experiences with rape and murder during the Vietnam War
and ultimately commits suicide. In other words, An says that war can unhinge men’s minds.
Oliver Stone's movie, Platoon, likewise raises questions about insanity, war, and theslaughter of fellow human beings in a world gone mad. Stone tells the story of a young man
straight out of college who goes to fight in the Vietnam War and grows as a human being
through his experiences, but the film depicts a world enveloped in a horrifying madness
where American soldiers show no hesitation in smashing in the heads of Vietnamese
civilians. Through this film Stone asks questions such as, "Is this really what war is like?"and "What is the meaning of peace?" In the real Vietnam War there were cases ofAmerican soldiers shoving sticks into women's vaginas and then killing them. Madness andwar are also themes of director Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece Apocalypse Now. In
this film as well, Coppola shows how murder and rape take place in the background of abigger form of violence called "war" and "invasion".
Even so, the Korean War was a somewhat different situation. UN soldiers did not reallyhave a reason to view the women they were raping as belonging to an enemy nation. Indeed,most sexual violence was directed at South Korean women, who were theoretically on theirside. Perhaps this can only be explained as the madness of war. The right to defend oneselfand conduct operations in times and states of war are military concepts incomparable withpeacetime conduct. On the front lines of the battlefield, there are no police or even military
police with the power to maintain public order, and so soldiers are effectively free to do as
they please. In such a situation, soldiers can cast off the shackles of their own humanity anddrop to the level of animals. This state may not be one of sanity or madness, but rather ofsomething in between. Thus, acts like rape and murder, whether undertaken impulsively orsystematically, are likely to happen, and this is why many have argued that sexual violenceis an inevitable part of war.
Despite all this, it is not true that all armies engage in sexual violence in times of war. As I
already mentioned, I know from my own experience that the Chinese Army did no harm towomen during the Korean War, which might have been related to the Chinese Army's
policies towards sexual control. I have heard that the Chinese Army did not rape Japanesewomen at the end of World War II as well. As I have suggested, this case does present a
glimmer of hope that a war can be fought without the loss of one's own sanity.

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